Why Crash Diets Can Hurt Your Weight Loss Efforts

Crash diets often work…for a very short period of time.  After that short period of time, they hurt…bad.  Cutting calories down to extremely low levels, i.e. under 1200/day, can be very dangerous.  First of all, cutting calories down to this level means that your body will be missing out on key nutrients.  There is no way that you can sustain a crash diet and still get the necessary amount of vitamins and minerals that you need to keep your body healthy.  That is, you can’t get the necessary amount unless you take about 50 supplements each day.

Crash diets are a waste of time.  They may work for a few days, but after a while the damage you’ve done to your body is going to catch up to you.  What happens when you go on a crash diet is your body goes into starvation mode.  This means that it slows down all of its processes in order to conserve energy.  Thus, your body’s metabolic rate must slow down in order to accomadate this reduction in calories.

So what happens when you inevitably go back to eating more calories?  Well, you gain weight of course.  The worst problem then becomes that your metabolic rate will be so low that it will take a long time and a great deal of effort to get it back to where it was.  That will mean that you will likely not only put back on the weight that you lost, but you will also put on even more weight on top of that!  What’s worse is that it will then become harder to lose the weight because you are starting from a lower metabolic rate.

This is truly bad news for those on a crash diet.  If you’ve been on one in the past, you’ve probably experienced those problems.  If you’re thinking of going on a crash diet, hopefully this article will be enough to make you think again.  You may make bigger weight loss gains short-term, but it will not last and you will only make actually healthy weight loss more difficult.

One more point about crash diets is that a lot of the weight that you lose will be muscle and water weight.  As a result, you may not actually look the way you want even if you drop the weight that you want.  You may actually end up looking physically ill.  I’ve seen it many times before and it’s not a pretty site.

So take the time out now and get started on a healthy weight loss program.  Be patient and be consistent.  Make those necessary lifestyle changes now so that everything becomes much easier later.